longexposure.nethttp://www.longexposure.net
while I should have been sleepingMon, 07 Oct 2013 22:49:55 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1Crusherhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=744
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=744#commentsMon, 07 Oct 2013 22:49:55 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=744Excitement and fear and second-thinking decisions seem to go hand-in-hand readily in the world of decrepit, corroded metal. Especially in this part of the world, such environments are few and far between, so it’s hard not to be enthusiastic. But, there’s that whole horror of waiting for things to disintegrate and commit one to a nightmare of jagged metal. Haven’t we done this before?

Up above, the mechanical elements and power control for this station were long ago fallen into disrepair, but there were niches that gave glimpses into the larger portion of the structure, which didn’t look to be in great condition, but certainly could have been worse.

I pressed against grimy concrete, peering into darkness, tracing the paths of ladders with my eye, and working out where the access point must be. It wasn’t difficult to find, and soon I was looking down the upper ladder into a place that had obviously seen a great deal of flooding over the years.

I was, in fact, on a flood plain, so the entire place must at times – recently, even – have been submerged, so a thin layer of filth wasn’t a huge surprise. My hand on the top rung, the ladder felt fairly secure. Feet a little further down, still good… for a few rungs. Before the ladder was done, I’d hit rungs I just wasn’t game to put my feet on, and I skipped the last two entirely, leaving me on the upper landing, which crunched softly under my feet.

Immediate parallels came to mind of half a world away, corroded gangways snapping beneath my weight, and similarly, if this one went, there’d be nowhere to go but way down. Major vertical supports looked sturdy, but the cross-supports between them had been reduced to rusty spindles of metal, and who knew what the platform on which I stood was connected to? Gingerly, I edged my way into position and began shooting, lighting from where I was, bouncing lights off different surfaces, rather than moving around to place anything.

With that, I was done, and gear went haphazardly into a bag, to be sorted out later. When I reached the ladder, I went for the highest rung I could get my fingers on, and made mental contingency plans for the worst. It was only seconds later, though, that I was up and out and standing on sweet, sweet concrete again, surrounded by the night-time sounds of trees and insects and frogs.

Inside and outside are different worlds, tenuously connected, and the tension of the inside was nowhere to be seen now. Just a benign tower in a valley, under a sea of stars.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7444Heat Painthttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=739
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=739#commentsTue, 01 Oct 2013 21:49:09 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=739Rendering visible the more abstract properties of a scene still intrigues me, and while my earlier tinkering with mapping temperature to colour was a bit limited, I was inspired to take it a little further. So, exhibit one: a familiar junction, lit in a conventional way to look purdy:

This time around, I’m still working with temperature, and representing it with colour. However, where before I was measuring air temperature, this time I’m measuring it at the surface. As before, a high and low temperature bound are set based on sampling the environment before the shooting begins, and in this case the low was around 20.2 degrees celsius, and the high around 23. On a practical level, the benefit of the surface sampling for my purposes here is that I get a super-accurate reading every second, rather than the gradual shift over minutes that the ambient sensor yields.

Colour mapping was set to run from green for cool, to red for hot, and I’ve improved the interpolation of intermediate colours for temperatures that fall somewhere in the middle of the range. Most significant, though, is that instead of just displaying some kind of floating indication, this new setup projects the coloured light onto the sampled area, which a nerd friend suggested a while back. So, the end result is a more intuitive visualisation of the heat distribution in the scene.

I almost want to call it a false-colour representation, but at least from a photographic perspective these were the actual colours involved…

Note the warm water spilling from the right-hand tunnel, and the cool water flowing from the left!

As always, field testing brings up obvious limitations. In this case, the fact that the actual processing hardware has indicator LEDs on it was blindingly obvious, and was the biggest pain; a shirt wrapped around it mostly resolved things. Second most frustrating was the fact that I’d configured the light to pulse on briefly on a button press. What I really needed was it to be constantly illuminating, updating temperature reading and colour each second, so that I could focus on moving it around. If I’d taken a laptop I could have fixed that, but for some reason I opted not to :P Next time!

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7391Distributionhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=736
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=736#commentsSun, 29 Sep 2013 22:57:48 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=736“Is this an old one” asked a friend on seeing this, and not intending a Lovecraftian reference to nefarious superbeings. Yeah, yeah, it’s a hazard, at least when finding things near home on which to experiment with lighting. Can’t you see that subtle difference in diffusion in the third light on the left?!

So, we dug up the aforementioned similar photo, and it was the same system, different section, from a couple of years back. I’d noted it last night when heading to my planned spot, though, and in particular the new spraypainted cocks and swastikas that plaster it. If there’s one thing that does change over time, it’s that level of activity.

The main junction gathers more tags than most, which isn’t surprising given that it’s fairly accessible, and after a while it marks the passage of time in an almost poignant way. Bits that were once prominent fade and are covered, or are scoured by occasional floods.

It’s a fact of life that, whatever the motivation, people are going to leave their mark, and who knows, maybe one day generations will dig up antique spraypainted penises and view them with the kind of reverence that people regard scratched names on walls in ancient stone. It could happen. Maybe.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7361The Feet of Small Childrenhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=729
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=729#commentsFri, 27 Sep 2013 05:42:03 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=729It’s hard not to wonder how this structure came to be the way it is. Parts are obvious – it was a creek, it was extended to serve further drainage, and so on. But how did it come to have small children’s footprints in the concrete floor?

There are two major branches to this system: one was the original creek fed from the waterholes, and the other, much longer, less-meandering extent is the more-obviously purpose-built stormwater drain. As a curious aside, when the waterholes were to be drained, an entirely different system was engineered, a deep tunnel bored directly to the river itself. Maybe the creek just wasn’t deep or capacious enough back then, and perhaps the enclosed construction came much later.

But yes, footprints! In what seems to be a newer part of the drain (and I’ll use the term ‘new’ loosely, seeing the construction is the sort that shows up in other nearby systems at least a century old) there are footprints in the floor. It’s easy to picture kids wandering through the excavation and construction after the workers have gone home, but, was it covered at the time? Still open? In an age of efficient prefabricated segments, they don’t build drains that way anymore.

It all just reminds that as our built environment develops and becomes more sophisticated we nonetheless still have the same basic problems to solve as we always have, and we still resolve them the same way. And, clearly, infrastructure has always been used as a playground :)

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7296Watchers in the Darkhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=720
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=720#commentsWed, 10 Apr 2013 22:29:42 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=720Few things are as atmospheric as Science made flesh on a grand scale. The technology and tools of research feed awe and tingling excitement, whether it’s near or far from one’s own domains of expertise. Finally coming up on these hulking giants in the darkness, hearing the clicks, whirrs and juddering grind as they shift position in the midnight blackness was the stuff of fantasy.

Unsurprisingly, it was dark out here. Extraordinarily so. Positioned deliberately far from civilisation, away from both visible and invisible radiation sources, with warnings about powering down phones and radios, it sits amid a quiet complex past echidna roadkill and grazing kangaroos. Even the feeble setting moon provided little help to visibility, to the point that I walked into a fence, realising what it was only by feel – knowing it was there didn’t help me see it after.

All that *was* visible was the stars, so many, many stars. Staring upward into the field of inky black dotted with light was like gaining superhuman vision. Utter clarity.

I did count myself fortunate, though, to have that window of clear sky; within an hour, cloud swept in from the east, and replaced my starlit vista with muddied darkness.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7203Beating Heartshttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=712
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=712#commentsSun, 17 Feb 2013 22:49:00 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=712Abandoned theatres pull at emotional strings on a few levels. As architectural glories of a past age, they’re up there with asylums and rusting industrial curiosities. While the likes of the asylums were deliberately created to exist outside Civilisation, though, theatres were built to be at its heart.

Once upon a time, this immense space was thronging with people, its grand style and lavish decor a point of pride. In a time before television and the internet (gah!), places like this were a vital social hub, and it’s this that particularly strikes a chord. It’s not like these are neglected and forgotten remote locales – these enormous old theatres, at least those that survive, all loom over inner-city landscapes, boarded up and locked away to moulder and decay, the old facades and fire escapes passed by untold people day by day and year by year.

It’s not hard to picture the bustling patronage when the theatre was at its height of popularity slowly dwindling as time passed and the world changed around it. However important a place it might once have been, it gradually lost its social relevance, and, naturally, the flood of money required to operate and maintain facilities.

This particular theatre will be gone inside a year, slated for demolition, and condos (it seems appropriate to use the American term, for an American city) will take its place. There just isn’t the money or interest in an economically-depressed city (which is most of them, these days) to sustain conservation, even when the place is in so remarkably good condition.

That said, there’d be a kind of hypocrisy in bemoaning the lack of preservation too far, when the whole point of seeking these out was to see the neglected social remnants of a past generation. I can’t, after all, say I’ve sought out any active theatres in my travels. I’ll just stay content with the fact that I had the good fortune to see this place while it lasted.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7123Another Town Off The Maphttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=706
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=706#commentsSat, 09 Feb 2013 13:50:55 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=706Sitting on the swings of a playground, watching the sun go down, it occurred to me that this nicely-kept park was the last thing I expected to see at the remnant of this Queensland mining town. Not that I knew at the time, but it’s the pride and joy of the town’s last resident, who did walk by and wave. We waved back, not realising the man was the only reason the town hasn’t yet been swallowed by the open pit mine that borders it.

When playing decay tourist, it’s easy to focus on the physical aspects – collapsing buildings, mouldering curtains, and all the other elements that feed into that aesthetic. But, sometimes we’re fortunate, and find some insights into the human history that fleshes things out and make it more than just a movie set.

Somewhere, I have photos of the stickers on some kitchen cupboard doors: Masters of the Universe, Magic Mountain, Samboy, Beware of Strangers. There isn’t much of a floor left in much of the house that held them, and the back yard is a slope of long grass and angular prickly pears, crowned with a bent Hills Hoist.

Reading into the history of a dying town is sobering, though. It’s easy to pass through unaware of the despair and heartache, and the stress that drove people to departure and suicide. It’s inevitable that coming to appreciate just a touch of the reality is a humbling thing.

To the guy who dutifully maintains the facilities I enjoyed for an afternoon: you do fine work. I hope you have the chance to continue to do so for a long time to come.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=7060Christmas Eve at Radium Hillhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=696
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=696#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 13:02:18 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=696A fragment of a dream from a past age stands crumbling in the remote South Australian desert. It’s a dead and baked plain now, with a few skeletal monoliths in concrete, but for a while there were people here, running Australia’s first uranium mine, in a town called Radium Hill.

This was one of those places that first seems ridiculously implausible to contemplate visiting, and yet crystalises into a potentially achievable goal. At the last moment, we scrapped our plans to head north into the tropics, and plotted a course south-west across the continent instead. Fleeing a city gearing up for Christmas festivities, we drove into darkness and storms, and finally found the desert landscape I’d never properly seen on this continent. In the next nine days, we’d do seven thousand kilometres, though our initial destination was a little less than two thousand kilometres from home.

Atomic science pioneers Marie Curie and Ernest Rutherford were among those who received material from Radium Hill, which saw a few abortive attempts at sustaining mines in the bleak desert. Even the incredible value of materials like radium and uranium weren’t quite sufficient to keep things going longer term. Until the conclusion second world war, that is, when the world entered the age of atomic weapons, and uranium became tremendously important.

A heat wave tore across Australia as we passed through Broken Hill, crossed the border into South Australia, and hauled ourselves along the featureless highway through the desert. GPS tracking and maps meant that even at one in the morning, we somehow found the old road off the Barrier Highway that we were looking for. It was a rutted and disused thing, and we walked it a little first. And we found a railway line.

A new line, elevated somewhat on a gravel bed, cutting the old road completely. Beyond the line, the road was barely discernible, an overgrown dirt and rock path covered in scrub. With gullies and ruts crossing the landscape, there’s just no way to get a vehicle there anymore. Hiking seemed briefly the only option, but a fifty kilometre hike through remote desert with temperatures in the mid-forties is what tourists do to die in Australia.

When we set out to find Radium Hill, it was for the novelty of finding the ruins of the mine. What I didn’t expect was that the town itself, half a century after being demolished along with the mine, would be the subject of such sentiment as became evident. Historical records make it very clear that there’s almost nothing physical left of either the mine or the town, but there are people who remember the way it once was, and we were to encounter some of them.

Back in Broken Hill, where phones and internet worked, we began calling people. Maybe there just wasn’t a way out there anymore, since the train line went through? It was hard to tell when anyone had last been to Radium Hill. Eventually, we figured the thing to do was visit homesteads in the area, and ask for help.

“You have family out there?” was a striking question that drove home that people here still hold close ties to the old town. Not so much the mine, which seemed a minor footnote, but the town itself, thirteen hundred people strong in its heyday, with sporting teams, a swimming pool (this is the central Australian desert!) and a community bonded over the harshness of desert existence and the dangers of mine work.

So, eventually, thanks to locals, we saw the old concrete headframe and ore bins of the Radium Hill mine loom large on the flat expanse of desert. The drive in was slow and careful; while nearby residents knew we were out there, and were waiting for word that we’d come back safely, we weren’t about to risk being stranded. Forty litres of water in the back was a mild comfort, at least.

And, so, we arrived. A bleak, parched landscape, with literally no shade beyond the tiny patch under the headframe, over the now-concreted main shaft, where kangaroos took shelter before bounding away at our arrival. So little remained to show that a town had once stood here – a few roads in varying states of disrepair, the town’s reservoir, the remains of the pool.

The day passed slowly while we hid under the headframe and waited for nightfall and stars, to take the shots we’d planned. Gusts of wind were like an oven. Flocks of wild emu ran past the radioactive waste dumps, and we drank litre after litre of water, willing the sun to dip lower in the sky.

Before the day finally ended, though, we took a final trip to the outskirts of town, down a road of soft red dirt, to the Radium Hill cemetery. In the final rays of the sunset, I saw not the decrepit pioneer grave site I expected, but a tended yard. An active cemetery. Fresh memorial stones from within a year or two mark the resting places of people born in the twenties.

It’s a long time since anyone lived here, and as time goes by fewer people still will remember there was once life and community in this patch of desert that once harboured some desirable ores. It’s getting harder to even reach what little remains of the town, and one day it won’t be accessible at all.

But, there are still people, half a century on, who consider this place their home, and whose last wish is to return when they die. With that poignant thought, we watched the desert stars twinkle into existence, and left Radium Hill behind us in the warm desert night.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=6966The Heat Maphttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=693
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=693#commentsTue, 05 Feb 2013 01:28:53 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=693It’s years ago now, but I remember being really inspired by a long exposure of a street, with a line of light meandering up and down it. It wasn’t that it was visually exciting, but that the height of the line represented the strength of the local wifi signal. More than just a pretty picture, this was a graph of something abstract that related directly to the geography, and it was immediately engaging. I’ve been caught up with the idea of doing something like that myself ever since, and I finally did something about it.

I decided to map temperature gradients visually. Specifically, in drains.

So, I built something. It’s a box with temperature sensors (I went through three before I found one responsive and sensitive enough) and a bright colour-shifting light. It has a few buttons for setting upper and lower temperature bounds, choosing colours for warm and cool extremes, and for pulsing the light for the sake of photography.

The current temperature is read, and based on where it falls between the bounds, the light is set to a corresponding colour between its selected extremes. So, the idea is that the pattern of lights will transition between colours, bringing the abstraction of temperature shift into concrete visual existence.

In practice, of course, there were hiccups, and things that worked fine in testing didn’t work so perfectly in the field. Most notably, the gradual shift for some reason became a hard change between the extremes, which was a problem I’d encountered in development but thought was resolved (both through software fixes and using a temperature gauge with higher precision). Still, I was pleased enough to get a basic result.

It took a few iterations to come up with an approach that was actually visually appealing. Throwing lights at drains gets complicated rapidly, and doesn’t always lead to pleasant results. I’ve had a few other suggestions thrown my way while working on this, like mapping surface rather than air temperature, or reflecting drain dimensions visually, but those will take some thought yet.

For all the tedium of experimenting and reworking, it’s good fun.

Probably needs more lasers, though.

]]>http://www.longexposure.net/?feed=rss2&p=6932Gargantuanhttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=683
http://www.longexposure.net/?p=683#commentsTue, 15 Jan 2013 22:36:57 +0000longexposurehttp://www.longexposure.net/?p=683When the lake level breaches the threshold of this structure, the sound must be unimaginable. A volume of water the area of the lake surface, dropping a hundred metres vertically before blasting through the massive tunnel beyond the dam wall.

I knew this place was in the middle of nowhere, but I don’t think I really appreciated how long it would take to drive that last push through the mountains. Miserably winding alpine roads were an unpleasant change from the long stretches of high-speed highway, with more wildlife on the roads than ever. A necessarily late afternoon timing meant kangaroos bouncing suicidally into the road, eager to join their smashed relatives across the bitumen. The final fifty kilometre loop of undulating dirt at least let me pretend I was a rally driver for a bit.

On finally arriving, though, with the funnel mouth easing into view, it was worth it, and worth having ventured so far from civilisation in general (I don’t think ski resorts count as civilisation). Thumbing its nose at geography, creating a new topography, this structure is something truly worthy of awe.

I think my own thoughts were something like “wow, this is really big.”

The classic approach to this place is to abseil in, which really would be something, but I was travelling light and had no such gear on hand. Lesson learned: don’t leave home without everything you own.

Curiosity satisfied, and alpine roads quickly becoming a memory, I was left with a thought: Australia has two of these spillways. I plotted a route to the other.